Author and poet Owen Sheers fills out the Idler questionnaire

Are you happy?

Yes, I am. It’s always a fragile feeling, but the last few years have been kind to me. I’ve been lucky enough to marry a wonderful person, and becoming a father has introduced me to a variety of happiness I didn’t know it was possible to feel.

What are you reading at the moment?

I have a bad habit of having more than one book on the go. I’ve just started Alison Wearing’s Honeymoon in Purdah, which is great. I’m also enjoying Colm Tobin’s study On Elizabeth Bishop and Ben MacIntyre’s A Spy Among Friends. I want to re-read To Kill a Mocking Bird before the release of Go Set a Watchman next month.

What was your worst job?

Working in a breadcrumb factory outside Oxford. All morning we made the bread. Then all afternoon we crumbed it…

How many hours do you work each day ?

There is no constant. It all depends on the project I’m working on and where I am in its progress. I’ve had a bit of a tendency to hothouse my writing recently. I wrote the first draft of Pink Mist in ten days, and the first draft of I Saw a Man in three months. Both were, however, written on the foundations of much longer hinterlands. I’d been working on the novel and thinking about it on and off for seven years before finally sitting down to write that draft. And for Pink Mist I’d done extensive research, interviewing recently wounded soldiers and their families.

Town mouse or country mouse?

For living, country, certainly. Home is now a converted barn under an iron age hill for in the Black Mountains in Wales. But because of that I love regular injections of city-living. I used to live in New York and still have a great affection for that island.

Does love bring happiness or misery?

If it’s really love, then happiness. The potential of the loss of of that happiness, that person, is deeply sad and painful, of course. But I’m not sure that’s misery, as the resonance of the love will always remain, and in the long term increasingly bleed into that pain from the edges.

Mp3 or vinyl, real or e book?

Vinyl when I can get my old Dynatron to work. Day by day, Mp3, but still CDs in the car. Real book – it’s a vital escape from the screen, and it offers a landscape of complete focus. I like feeling the weight of what has and has not yet been read.

What are your three greatest pleasures?

I’m only allowed three? Off the top of my head, and seasonally influenced…

Being with my wife. Interpret that how you will…

Seeing my daughter laugh.

Swimming in a sunlit river.

Do you believe in the nap?

Oh yes.

What advice do you have for young people? 

Listen as eloquently as you speak. Keep an eye on your online and digital life. It’s there to work for you, not you it. It’s there to help you be creative, not to dull your senses to the lived human world.

ENDS

Owen Sheers’ new novel, I Saw a Man, is published by Faber.